Challenge

The Brigade creates interactive digital experiences. Intel, Spotify and other leading brands count on The Brigade for custom development of leading-edge web applications to engage target audiences in real time in the moment of interest. Its team handles everything – from strategy, design and back-end architecture to social media promotion. The Brigade used Datomic to build a social music application for Spotify called Resonate. The app captures a listener’s habits and cross-references them with others’ preferences, then compares their musical tastes based on where they work. Listeners in a common work environment enjoy a more interactive radio experience.

Accelerate Application Development

As they got into the project, customer requirements began to change. Customer satisfaction is extremely important to The Brigade, but it would have been very costly to meet their needs with MapReduce jobs in DynamoDB alone. Similarly, an SQL database would have been expensive to deploy and maintain. With a fixed price for application development, they would have had to sacrifice features instead of adding developer time “Datomic added to DynamoDB was the only option that didn’t force us to sacrifice features or add the expense of developer time. Without it, we would have had to push back a lot more, as the features would have been too difficult.” As the app’s user base grows, and the application requirements evolve, the team has the flexibility to add new features due to Datomic’s flexible information model. “Datomic gives me the flexibility to deal with things as they change. We can go back and pull in extra data we didn’t know we needed when we built the initial schema.”

DynamoDB + Datomic = The Best of All Worlds

While DynamoDB simplifies deployment, management and scalability; Datomic adds flexible schemas, robust query capabilities and data store portability. “We don’t have to make tradeoffs between noSQL and SQL databases any more. We get solutions to market faster and are more responsive to customer requirements. Enterprise or Cloud deployments: we’re ready for both and can move between them as needed.”

For more information about how Datomic can boost speed, power and scalability for your business, contact us.